Even after his run, Absalom was still thinking about Kerri.
Not with youthful adoration like he might have in the past. He wasn’t imagining ways she could be his detective sidekick or even fantasizing about a possible future with the two of them in a speculative fiction landscape. It was their meeting that bothered him. He was missing something, not grasping a nuance in her speech pattern. He used his old laptop to cross-check the name with all the accents he could think of—yet he still turned up nothing. Though he was off for the next ten days and someone else had picked up the case, he didn’t trust them to see what he saw. He closed the laptop and dressed to go to work. He was around the corner from the police station, almost at the front steps, when he bumped into someone coming out of
